*the-photos

What's this all about?

The idea of this application is to provide with a tool to present your photographic-work stored at Flickr on your own website.

To showcase the conceptual possibilities of this application in default-mode my own photos are used.

Requirements

The following requirements had to be fulfilled:

• Easily manageable content administration for non tech-savvy users
• Findability of the photos via search-engines like Google
• Quick and easy installation, configuration and style editing
• Usability, accessibility and standard conformity had to be guarantied

Concept

To fulfill the requirements I decided:

• To make the application easy administrable everything required to have your photos shown on your website is done on Flickr.
• Findability via search-engines will be guarantied by equipping your albums and photos by as much meta-information as available.
• For a quick and easy installation the programming had to be done in a way that the application runs on a standard-account available through internet-service-providers.
  Required configuration had to be scaled down to a minimum. All you should need is a Flickr-User-ID and a Collection-ID.
  The pages had to be marked up in a way to give enough hooks to allow for a large degree of design changes without the need to touch the Html-code.
• Best practice will be followed in information-architecture-design (navigation, organization, labeling), frontend-design and coding with structured, semantic Html & Cssx in compliance with WCAG A

Implementation

Up-to-date albums and photos with their respective meta-data are pulled on demand from Flickr by this application.
Albums and photo data are then post-processed for exposition on-the-fly.
The albums and photos with their attendant meta-data are presented in pure html-sites dynamically enhanced with Google-maps where applicable or alternatively in Flash-slideshows that provide a full-screen option.
To speed up the process data from Flickr is cached to avoid unnecessary round-trips.

Technologies used:

• Php has been used to program the web-application.
  The phpFlickr class acts as a wrapper for the Flickr-API.
• Flash is utilized for the presentation of slideshows.
• The Google-Maps-Api with the help of JavaScript serves to enhance the representation of photo geo-data.

Putting into operation

Photos have to be stored on a Flickr-account^[1] in any desired number of albums in one gallery (photosets in a collection in flickr-speak).
These photos should be amended on the Flickr site with meta informations like titles and descriptions plus tags and preferably even geo-codes.
¹(If you prefer not to have your photos show to the public on Flickr mark them as private.)

For installation this application has simply to be uploaded on any web-server.
Minimum configuration is archived by providing your Flickr-User-ID and the ID of your Flickr-collection that holds the photosets you like to be shown.
Additionally you have to adapt the content of your footer and imprint-page.
To change the design of your website, tweak the style-sheet at will.